The Politics of Sex Trafficking A Moral Geography

This book offers a unique insight into the moral politics behind the making of human trafficking policy in Australia and the United States of America. As governments around the world rush to meet their international obligations to combat human trafficking, a heated debate has emerged over the rights, wrongs, and harms of prostitution, and its relationship to sex trafficking.

The Politics of Sex Trafficking identifies and challenges intrinsic notions of moral harm that have pervaded trafficking discourse and resulted in a distinctly anti-prostitution agenda in trafficking policy in recent decades. Including rare interviews with key political actors, this book charts the competing perspectives of feminist, faith-based, and sex-worker activists, and their efforts to influence policy-makers. This critical account of the creation of anti-trafficking policy challenges the sex trafficking narrative dominant in US Congressional and Australian Parliamentary hearings, and demonstrates the power of a moral politics in shaping policy.

This book will appeal to academics across the fields of criminology, criminal justice, law, human rights and gender studies, as well as policy-makers.

Erin O'Brien is Lecturer in the School of Justice at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Her research focuses on political activism and policy-making in relation to issues of sex, gender and justice. She also researches the tactics of special interest groups, specifically politically motivated law-breaking and acts of civil disobedience. Erin is co-editor of Crime, Justice and Social Democracy: International Perspectives (Palgrave, 2013).

 
Sharon Hayes is Senior Lecturer in the School of Justice at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Her research revolves around gender, sex and crime. She has recently co-authored Sex, Crime and Morality (2012) and is currently completing another monograph on the impact of discourses of romantic love on abuse in relationships entitled Sex, Love and Abuse (Palgrave, forthcoming).

Belinda Carpenter is Professor in the School of Justice and Director of the Crime and Justice Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. She teaches, supervises and researches at the intersection of social and criminal justice in areas as diverse as death investigation, sex crimes and violent offending women. Belinda has recently co-authored two monographs Sex, Crime and Morality (2012), and Justice in Society (2012).

List of abbreviations
Acknowledgements
1. The Politics of Sex Trafficking
2. Perspectives and Players
3. Stories of Trafficking
4. Measuring Trafficking
5. Defining Trafficking
6. Causes of Trafficking
7. Silencing Dissent
8. A Moral Geography
References
Index