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Of Frames, Cons and Affects: Constructing and Responding to Prostitution and Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation

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Abstract

This article provides a critical analysis of the manner in which prostitution and trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation was ‘framed’ by official discourses in order to support the reforms in England and Wales contained within the Policing and Crime Act 2009. Drawing upon the recent work of Judith Butler, emphasis will be placed on how the schema of the vulnerable prostitute was fundamental to invoking emotional affects, which justified certain political effects, especially the move towards criminalising the purchase of sexual services. However, on closer analysis the article will uncover an agenda influenced by law and order/morality, immigration and a ‘fear of the enemy’. Furthermore, it will be argued that New Labour’s framing of the problematic enabled the State to avoid dealing with the more difficult, but more urgent, issues of the differential distribution of wealth, precarity and the engendering of an ethical and global responsibility for the other.

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Notes

  1. See for example the cases discussed in The Wrong Kind of Victim? (Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group 2010).

  2. Council of Europe Action Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings 2005; United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children 2000.

  3. The exception to this was a brief discussion in the House of Lords, in which Lord Desai challenged the links assumed by New Labour’s approach (see House of Lords 2009, cols. 244–245). On the question of supply, demand and trafficking, see Anderson and O’Connell Davidson (2003) and GAATW.

  4. See for example the victim in the case of R v Dunkova [2010] EWCA Crim 1318, in which a 15 year old girl from Slovakia was trafficked into the UK and put to work on the streets of Sheffield.

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Carline, A. Of Frames, Cons and Affects: Constructing and Responding to Prostitution and Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation. Fem Leg Stud 20, 207–225 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-012-9208-7

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