You can't see it if you’re not looking: Sex trafficking in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

Domestic sex trafficking in Aotearoa has received little contemporary focus due to widespread ambiguity about its nature and prevalence, and discussion on the topic is made difficult by frequent and problematic conflation of ‘sex work’ with ‘trafficking’. This thesis aimed to explore the experiences of Aotearoa victims of sex trafficking, using a narrative approach underpinned by a feminist and social constructionist epistemology in order to ethically navigate methodological issues presented by the lieklihood of participants’ past experiences of trauma and gender-based violence. I interviewed 16 victims of trafficking and six key informants, and surveyed 70 medical and 61 social service practitioners. I found that vulnerability to exploitation was catalysed through the intersection of youthfulness, social marginality, and disrupted attachment relationships, which abusers then capitalised on by being perceived as a source of protective love (a phenomenon I label the ‘love-illusion’). Victims’ experiences and attempts to disclose these were often implicitly forbidden within both formal and social contexts. Accordingly, respondents indicated that unfamiliar disclosures were precluded by knowledge gaps or practitioners’ attempts to consign victims’ experiences into subjectively more familiar categories of violence. This thesis provides two layers of analysis. Firstly, it argues for the viability of the feminist concepts of voice and silencing to theorise the experiences of story suppression threaded throughout the findings. Secondly, by applying Bourdieusian concepts of field, habitus, and capital to victims’ experiences, the thesis constructs an explanatory framework for participants’ vulnerability to abuse, their recruitment into and exploitation through trafficking, and their pathways to escape and recovery. This thesis sets out the implications emerging from the two-tier analysis, including practice imperatives regarding prevention, intervention, and support. Ultimately, this thesis argues that these practice imperatives cannot be progressed without the establishment of a shared definitional clarity and a cohesive understanding of the nature of trafficking, and consequent support and intervention needs across and between agencies. This thesis therefore creates an impetus for implementing a feminist and social constructionist understanding of domestic trafficking in order to recognise the manifestations of harm of this social phenomenon in Aotearoa.