Making a Victim: How White Slavery Discourse Shapes the UK’s Anti-trafficking Strategy

Abstract

The research question guiding this dissertation is, ‘How can queer methodology help to understand the conceptualisation of modern slavery in the UK?’ To answer this question, I begin with present-day UK modern slavery policy and investigate themes of ideal victimhood that have persisted within contemporary discourse. I propose that the figure of the ‘ideal victim’ constructed within white slavery narratives at the turn of the twentieth century remains central to the framing of British anti-trafficking policy today. I turn towards queer genealogy to untangle the ‘ideal victim’ from her role in white slavery narratives and its echoes in contemporary anti-trafficking policy. This is for three reasons. First, a queer critique highlights how national borders become inscribed on a gendered and racialised body. Second, an examination of Butlerian subjectivity within the law demonstrates how there is not necessarily a ‘real’ subject within the law, but rather one which is constructed within and by the law to uphold larger political structures. Third, queer temporality reminds us that ideal victims as subjects within the law are not just a linear continuation of historic nationalist practice, but rather a manifestation of power which, like any dominant discourse, must be continually practised and reinforced. A queer reading of the ideal victim then, is uniquely positioned to bring historic discourse into conversation with contemporary anti-trafficking policy. In order to do this, I pull from two sources of data. First are the Annual Reports of the National Vigilance Association (NVA) from 1885-1912. Where a volume of Annual Reports are missing (1899 - 1906), I have consulted the Executive Committee Meeting Notes and NVA letters exchanged with the Home Office. These reports were read and coded in NVivo (a qualitative coding software program) with adjectives that the NVA used to characterise victims and perpetrators to understand how they began to define subjects within their work. Second are a collection of interviews with stakeholders involved in the production of the Modern Slavery Act (MSA). These interviews were transcribed and coded in NVivo to understand the framing participants used to describe modern slavery and trafficking victims. The aim is to illuminate how policy makers on the MSA conceive of the UK’s modern slavery strategy and explore if thematic resonances from the early twentieth century persist in contemporary law. This project demonstrates how historic narratives surrounding white slavery reoccur in contemporary discussions of modern slavery because they serve to metaphorically and materially reinforce UK borders and justify inadequate response to asylum seekers. This is done by creating a hierarchy of victimhood in which the ideal victim from white slavery remains central to the political and public discourse.