Abstract
Social workers play a pivotal part in the implementation of human trafficking policies, not least in identification of victims. When assessing who is and who is not a trafficking victim, boundaries are drawn between different groups of people and the human trafficking definition is operationalised. However, the actual practice of trafficking identification has not been sufficiently explored. Based on 12 qualitative interviews with social workers in Norway and taking an institutional ethnographic approach, I argue that a framing of identification as identification work underlines the ongoing assessments and actions that comprise identification, as well as ethical tensions in social workers’ identification practice.
Introduction
Over the past couple of decades, combatting human trafficking has become an important goal in international and national policies. Human trafficking has become a central framing for understandings of certain types of exploitation of people, originally and most notably in the field of prostitution/sex work, but with an increasing focus on labour exploitation and other forms of exploitation.
Simultaneously, a growing body of research criticises simplistic understandings of vulnerability, migration, and exploitation in anti-trafficking policies, and ‘modern slavery’ discourses (Brace and Davidson, 2018; Charnley and Nkhoma, 2020; Chuang, 2015; Kempadoo, 2017). Examination of discursive and ideological elements of human trafficking policies has raised important discussions, not least about the power and control directed towards those assumed to be trafficking victims (Dottridge, 2007; FitzGerald, 2016; Kempadoo et al., 2015). However, there is lack of broader analyses that examine how institutional responses are shaped in practice (Jahnsen and Skilbrei, 2017), a sparsity of empirical investigations of anti-trafficking policy implementation (Gozdziak and Graveline, 2015), and not least, how both human trafficking and policy responses vary with context (Weitzer, 2007).
Social workers can play a pivotal part in anti-trafficking practice, in their direct contact with possible victims in risk groups, in service provision and assistance, and not least through identification of trafficking victims (Alvarez and Alessi, 2012; Hodge, 2014). Through the process of identification of human trafficking, boundaries are drawn between different groups of people (Aradau, 2004) and the definition of trafficking is given its real-world content.
This article seeks to illuminate how these boundaries are drawn in practice. Based on 12 qualitative interviews with social workers in three organisations in Norway, I examine how the human trafficking category is applied and understood by social workers, in their interactions with female sex sellers: What are the actual processes by which someone is defined as a trafficking victim?
Literature
Literature in the health and social work fields on trafficking identification often presents indicators of trafficking and advice on how they can be used to uncover trafficking in meetings with patients and clients (see, for example, Chisolm-Straker et al., 2019; Tortolero, 2020). Among reported barriers to identification are exploited persons’ unwillingness to self-identify (Baldwin et al., 2011), as well as lack of knowledge about human trafficking among practitioners (Donahue et al., 2019). Practice-oriented literature tends to a lesser degree to discuss some inherent definitional challenges in anti-trafficking work. Human trafficking is often associated with obviously coercive situations (involving for instance abductions, violence and threats). However, a wide variety of exploitative relationships can be classified as human trafficking under its international definition, established in the United Nations Trafficking Protocol (United Nations, 2000). It is therefore not a straightforward issue to describe what human trafficking is and what it is not.
Article 3a of the Trafficking Protocol defines human trafficking as a set of
A definitional challenge arises in that both what constitutes vulnerability and what constitutes the abuse of such a position is vague, contextual and situational (Chuang, 2014). Therefore, it is not entirely clear in which situations a person’s consent to their situation should be disregarded (Gallagher and McAdam, 2013; Skilbrei, 2010). This complicates identification in practice and necessitates much discretion on the part of those identifying trafficking, since a person’s own opinion about whether they have been coerced is not necessarily decisive.
A substantial body of literature criticises gendered and simplified understandings of trafficking victims in law and policy, and a privileging of ‘innocence’ in the overarching human trafficking discourse (Harrington, 2005; Srikantiah, 2007). This favours victims who appear young, innocent, unknowing and powerless, that is, ‘the ideal victim’ (Christie, 1986; Hoyle et al., 2011). However, there is limited empirical analysis of whether or how these simplified and ideal victim images manifest in the actual identification of victims, particularly by social workers engaging with people in potential risk situations.
The small empirical literature on identification practices has demonstrated that stereotyping and assumptions about innocence can influence who is identified as a victim of trafficking. Stereotypical depictions of trafficking victims can skew understandings of what to look for, for instance someone ‘looking sad and scared’ rather than there being a presence of debt, coercion and other more relevant aspects of exploitative situations (Spanger, 2011). Different institutional tasks and professional roles beyond responding to human trafficking also shape understandings and practice (Hoyle et al., 2011; Pickering and Ham, 2014). Human trafficking can be interpreted and understood very differently by, for example, representatives of the justice sector and social workers (Bjelland, 2016; Di Nicola, 2007; Skilbrei, 2010). The actual practice of identification needs more careful empirical attention and contextualisation, in turn casting light on what are common issues and challenges across national contexts.
As such, this article contributes to the research literature on human trafficking through empirical examination of social workers’ practices and dilemmas. I suggest that framing this as identification work highlights the ongoing assessments, actions and interactions that enter into these processes. I analyse identification practice in the light of discussions of ideology and (ideal) victimhood in anti-trafficking efforts.
The Norwegian context
While human trafficking in Norwegian debates is commonly framed as an issue of international migration, the legal definition does not exclude domestic trafficking. However, nearly all cases identified as trafficking in Norway have involved international migration. The latest available data that give some indication of identification prevalence are from 2016, when 262 persons received assistance as possible victims of trafficking, the majority of whom were female (79%) and trafficked for prostitution or sexual exploitation (72% of all victims) (Politidirektoratet, 2017). Victims of trafficking are entitled to temporary residence permits, housing, social support and medical services (Brunovskis, 2016). Being defined as a possible trafficking victim releases a set of rights, opening more options for assistance (and for social work) than are available for persons who are not identified as trafficked. However, the extent of these rights is conditional, and residence permits and assistance beyond the first 6 months depend on cooperation with the police in investigations. The willingness and ability of victims to cooperate therefore also play a great part in what assistance will be available in the long term (Brunovskis & Skilbrei, 2016).
Method and analytic framework
The analysis in this article is based on 12 qualitative interviews with social workers in three organisations working with sex sellers and victims of human trafficking in Norway. Two of these organisations (one municipal and one non-governmental) provide assistance in different forms to sex sellers generally. Important points of contact are outreach work in street prostitution and through advertisements. The organisations also offer medical check-ups, consultations with social workers, and social activities. The third organisation, also non-governmental, specialises in assisting victims of trafficking, and receives referrals from the two other organisations, and others who encounter possible trafficking victims. Respondents were recruited by approaching the organisations with a request for interviews with social workers with identification experience. All organisations agreed to participate. In the interviews, I asked about my informants’ day-to-day work, what assessments they made and what actions they took in interacting with possibly trafficked persons. To ensure that the interviews provided sufficient detail on practices and assessments, I also asked specifically about the five latest instances where social workers had developed a suspicion of human trafficking, and what were their step-by-step assessments and practice in these cases. This interview strategy was chosen to offset one central limitation in the methodological approach, in that asking respondents to describe their practice retrospectively might elicit a rather different picture than what might have been accessible through observation. However, observation was deemed not to be a feasible strategy in this study. One ethical consideration was whether possible trafficking victims would be able to give free and informed consent for observation to take place, being in a position of dependency and vulnerability in their interactions with social workers. Ethical considerations were also tied to the possibility that a researcher’s presence during social workers’ consultations could negatively influence the willingness of possible trafficking victims to share information about exploitative situations. Also, in practical terms, while suspicion of trafficking is serious, it is also a relatively rare occurrence, meaning that it would be very difficult to time observation to be able to observe social workers’ relevant practice. All interviews were recorded with the respondents’ consent, transcribed and analysed using NVivo 10 software.
Taking a starting point in the everyday practice of my respondents, I draw on institutional ethnography, developed by Dorothy E Smith (1987, 2005, 2006) and others (Campbell, 1998; DeVault, 2013; DeVault and McCoy, 2006). In an institutional ethnographic approach, the researcher starts from the point of people’s day-to-day experience, knowledge and local situatedness, with a goal to understand ‘how things happen’ (Campbell, 2003), and ultimately mapping out what institutionally shapes and organises subjects’ experience (Campbell, 2016). Institutional ethnography is an effective approach to producing knowledge that can inform social work practice (O’Neill, 1998). As a complementary perspective, I propose that by understanding identification work as a series of social classifications that are related to different social ‘levels’, some of the complexity involved in social workers’ experiences of identification work can be untangled. Analytically separating between classifications as a matter of (a) individual (self-)identification, identity and selfhood; (b) interpersonal relationships and how we understand each other; and (c) the institutional allocation of administrative labels (Jenkins, 2000: 10) illuminates the considerations that go into identification work. While identification-as-detection takes place at the individual and interpersonal levels, identification-as-status assignation involves an allocation of an administrative label.
Findings: Identification of human trafficking in social workers’ daily practice
My basic question going into this research was how social workers identify victims of trafficking. A partial answer is ‘not easily’. Translating abstract legal terms that define human trafficking into observable elements in people’s lives is not straightforward: What is vulnerability? What is exploitation, in concrete terms? Most people would agree that taking all of someone’s money from sex sale is exploitation, but what about taking some, in exchange for its organisation? Is 50 percent exploitation? 20 percent? Boundaries are fluid and not easily drawn in unregulated contexts.
Frontline social workers generally go through three stages in their identification work. The first stage is suspicion and concern, or a feeling that ‘something is wrong’ and that this ‘wrong’ may or may not include human trafficking. The second stage involves trying to elicit more information from the women they suspect might be trafficked and they may try to discuss the issue of possible exploitation with them. In the third stage, social workers consider how (or whether) to recommend seeking assistance for a person they define as a trafficking victim, that is, going from detection to formal victim status in the identification process. I elaborate on each of these stages below.
The first step – Suspicion and concern
Only in a very few cases did women approach the social workers asking for help to leave an exploitative situation. When they did, it was generally when something had happened to make the situation untenable, for example, violence or threats. One woman who sought help said she had paid more than 20,000 Euros to a ‘madam’ and was still being told her debts were unchanged. Since cases of asking for help were rare, identification of trafficking was more often initiated by the social workers after something caused concern – for instance in what the women said, or in their demeanour and behaviour, or background. In a few cases, elements of control appeared obvious, including having a man intervene and stop conversations between the women and social workers and taking away information leaflets about assistance options. In other cases (and more commonly), control or exploitation were less obvious, but something still seemed ‘off’, particularly in issues relating to money, travel or living arrangements. Some examples included, If they say they come from a very poor region, but that they flew here directly, then I think that it takes some doing just to get on a plane and go to Norway, like completely out of the blue . . . There was this young girl, she was really reserved, and I could get no eye contact and she seemed very jumpy. She said she slept at the central train station. And then I think, there’s something . . . It’s not common to sleep at the train station, they usually have a [social] network or someone that they can stay with. Sometimes, if they say they have a boyfriend, I might ask, so what’s he like, what is his job? Do you live here together? And then if she says, no, he’s back home. Oh, is he, I may say, and you send all your money to him? And then she might say – yes, I give all my money to him. Then I think [that something’s off].
Issues that caused concern were thus related to money (whether the women paid money to someone else), the journey (whether someone else had arranged it), to what extent the women seemed to be in control of their situation (appearing to be under surveillance or subjected to violence) and whether or to what extent they displayed different vulnerabilities (e.g. unable to communicate in English, appearing to be very young, not being able to identify Norway on a map). Stories that appeared unusual or strange sometimes also induced suspicion. It was not enough for one of these elements to be present for social workers to suspect human trafficking as such, but more an issue of the total balance adding up to someone possibly being in a situation they could not get out of, and therefore to social workers trying to get more information.
It is worth noting that the ‘consent issue’ was not pivotal in the development of a suspicion of trafficking. While clearly coercive situations and women who explicitly had not consented to selling sex were readily recognised as trafficking, suspicion could equally arise in situations where women had consented to selling sex but were seen as vulnerable. Social workers were also fundamentally negative to depictions of ‘ideal victimhood’ in awareness raising campaigns or media coverage, calling them ‘irresponsible’. They were also concerned about victims being expected to behave in a specific way (e.g. ‘looking scared’) according to so-called indicators of human trafficking (see, for example, UNODC, n.d.) and noted that being in a coercive situation could just as often cause someone to react with anger as with sadness or other easily recognisable expressions of fear.
Underlining the complexity and fallibility in recognising signs of trafficking, one respondent said it was generally difficult to distinguish by observation alone, between organised prostitution and trafficking exploitation. She said, There are many women here now from [one country], we can never reach them when we try to call them on the phone, we’ve understood that they all live in this one apartment, and the wording of the ads is very similar. So, there are a number of issues that indicate that this is organised. But whether it’s organisation as in help with getting to Norway, or as in having a pimp, or as in trafficking, we have no idea.
Visible indicators of trafficking are thus not particularly useful in trying to assess whether someone might fit into the trafficking victim category, and most commonly, social workers would therefore try to get a more comprehensive image of what the situation was, which is the second step in their identification work.
The second step – Communicating about trafficking, doubts and dilemmas
One issue was immediately flagged by social workers as the main challenge in identification work: in their experience, persons who might fit within the trafficking victim category rarely saw themselves as victims, neither in a general sense, nor of human trafficking specifically. This points to a divide between how potentially exploitative relationships are understood by those defined as possible victims and by those who are assigned with the task to define them as such. This can complicate communication. Even in cases where women had explicitly wanted help, reported their exploiters to the police and where exploiters had been sentenced for trafficking, social workers said that the women involved did not necessarily agree that they had been trafficked as such, but had been more concerned with being subjected to individual crimes such as violence or threats.
In one such case, a social worker had been in close contact and worked with a woman over several years, from the point of identification and through two trials. In the view of the social worker, the woman had never felt comfortable with some of the criminal charges against her exploiters. Among the elements that had contributed to this case being prosecuted as human trafficking was her vulnerable situation when she was ‘recruited’ and transported to Norway. However, the social worker’s impression was that the focus on these elements had been alienating to the woman, who was irritated with repeated questions in police interviews and on the witness stand relating to the initial contact and travel with those later convicted of her trafficking.
The discrepancy between what might be defined as trafficking in the Norwegian bureaucracy and legal system, on the one hand, and the perception of many of the women concerned, on the other hand, meant that the social workers did not lean solely on the women’s own understanding of their situation. Rather they tried to uncover aspects of the women’s past and present circumstances that could comply with the human trafficking definition. Approaching the issue of possible exploitation, however, was presented by social workers as tricky and they needed to be careful, wary of jeopardising trust. Questions about travel arrangements, money, accommodation and so on – which were relevant to assess trafficking risk – were sometimes seen by the women as strange and irrelevant and could quickly shut down the conversation.
Categorising women as victims of trafficking when this did not mesh with the women’s own perception led to some discomfort and ambivalence among my respondents. They questioned their right, as privileged women with education and employment in one of the richest countries in the world, to define the women’s lives in a very different way to what the women did themselves. This was particularly the case when some of the women presented selling sex, even under exploitative conditions, as an improvement on their previous lives, or as part of a long-term strategy towards economic security in a situation where they saw few other alternatives.
Social workers would thus try to arrive – on some levels at least – at a common understanding of the situation of the women and approached it in terms of whether they might be in a situation they wanted to get out of, or whether they might need help in other ways. This was partially a question of providing information but was not a straightforward process in most cases. Some women were in relationships with men that social workers saw as manipulative and were seldom receptive to the idea that they were exploited. In yet other cases, social workers had experienced that some women had been in such extreme situations and been so traumatised that they had been unable to absorb and process information in general. There are thus several very varied reasons for why it can be complicated to ‘negotiate’ a common understanding of the situation in terms of whether the women are trafficked or not.
The third step – Recommending assistance
In the first two steps – the emergence of suspicion and eliciting further information – social workers try to assess whether there may be indications of exploitation and get an understanding of the social relationships of the women they work with. They highlighted ambivalence and grey areas and indicated that the trafficking category, for them, is far from binary but rather a continuum. They expressed that it was not a simple question of whether someone was or was not trafficked, and in many cases, it was difficult to draw a line.
A palpable shift happens when social workers try to assess whether a person could be eligible for assistance within the trafficking-specific system, and also, whether and to what extent they should recommend such assistance – that is, initiate a process of formal identification. While suspicions of trafficking rest on complex understandings and much ambivalence about what can and should be classified as human trafficking, other concerns come into play in considering the next steps.
Results of police investigations are crucial to the further outcomes for the women, most notably in whether they are eligible for a residence permit in Norway. Therefore, social workers’ experiences of past cases in the justice system enter into assessments of whether assistance will be beneficial in each particular case. This means that the women’s assistance needs are weighed against assessments of whether the system will be able to meet these needs. This largely hinges on whether social workers believe that the women have a case that is likely to succeed in the justice system.
It is important to note that social workers say that they always inform the women about the availability of trafficking-specific assistance and the potential eligibility for a temporary residence permit, as it is the right of any possible victim to receive such information. Social workers also arrange for legal advice for the women if there is indication that someone has been trafficked.
There is, however, a distinction between informing about and actively recommending trafficking-specific assistance, and the two were framed by the social workers as involving different ethical considerations and pressures. They expressed an ethical obligation to ensure that the women they worked with knew their rights and options, but equally, a duty not to create unrealistic expectations. Social workers expressed that they had, over time, become more reluctant to recommend such assistance. Their experience was that it was, for many, not particularly beneficial in the long term and could instil false hopes of residence permits, with a corresponding setback when hopes of a new life were quashed: We have identified fewer and fewer victims of trafficking, and I think that we focus on it less, on some level. And also, not that many people are really all that interested in being identified as a victim of trafficking.
Another expressed a related sentiment, in that she and her colleagues had previously been enthusiastic about trafficking assistance options, but had, over time, lost much of their belief that this assistance was beneficial. This introduces an element of resistance against the official push to identify trafficking: Previously, we recruited people [for assistance], because we thought – ‘we can help you, we have the reflection period, a safe place to stay, money for food, and then you can think for a while about whether you want to go to the police’. And that has become more and more difficult to ‘sell’ because we don’t believe in it to the same extent that we used to.
The scepticism towards trafficking-specific assistance had developed gradually and several social workers echoed that individual outcomes were far too unpredictable, and sometimes even damaging for the women involved. They were particularly concerned about cases where women had reported their traffickers to the police, but it had not resulted in prosecution: . . . we have seen in some cases that the police have arrested the traffickers, or the suspects, and let them out again, and what that means for the woman who has ‘snitched’ – it’s really horrid. They are left without any rights whatsoever, and they come back to us and they’re re-trafficked and they’re bruised from being beaten with baseball bats. Really . . . I sometimes think that they have nothing to gain by reporting to the police. The only consequence is that their traffickers are even more pissed off.
This is a very serious example of an outcome that has gone extremely wrong, and cases like this profoundly undermine social workers’ trust that the justice system will work to trafficked women’s advantage. This translates into considerable ethical qualms in assessments of whether to recommend assistance that rests on the women cooperating with the police. This further shows how the institutional framework that comprises the justice system and its logic becomes entangled with social work assessments, because the outcomes of investigations and legal proceedings to a large extent also determine the long-term assistance outcome. Taking on a criminal justice perspective, social workers would try to assess likely outcomes of investigations, trying to assess for instance whether the trafficker was in the country, whether the woman’s information could be sufficient for the police to investigate, and whether she was motivated to go through multiple trials. Not least, social workers were concerned that women who presented inconsistencies in their stories or were telling only partial truths would not be seen as credible victims and could thus suffer harm rather than being helped by going to the police. In these cases, social workers would generally aim to find other ways of assisting the women. However, depending particularly on their migration status and associated rights situations, assistance outside of the trafficking system can be considerably less comprehensive (e.g. in terms of access to legal assistance, temporary residence permits, certain health services (Brunovskis & Skilbrei, 2016)).
Social workers see the justice system as primarily working for those who have a clear understanding of themselves as victims and who present their story consistently and comprehensively from the outset. By implication, this is more likely if they have not consented to their exploitation, or that their understanding is that they have been exploited. And yet, as discussed in the background section of this article, the international definition of human trafficking specifies that consent to exploitation can be disregarded, if a position of vulnerability has been exploited. This is an understanding that is well reflected in social workers’ initial suspicions and assessment of whether someone is trafficked, but it is also an understanding that is, to a degree, filtered out by default when social workers need to consider whether trafficking-specific assistance is beneficial. Those who identify less with a victim role and are less sure about whether or how they want to move forward are perceived by social workers as less likely to succeed in the justice system, and thus less likely to benefit from trafficking-specific assistance in the long term.
Discussion
Understanding the processes described above as identification work underlines the complex assessments through the three phases of suspicion, information gathering and decisions about recommending assistance. All phases involve discretionary assessments and predictions of likely outcomes. These stages also involve very different applications of human trafficking understandings and social workers’ considerations shift along the process. This supports, but also adds to, previous research that has highlighted the importance of institutional frameworks and contexts for implementation of human trafficking policies (Wan Ismail et al., 2017) and the significance of the professional roles and mandates in how human trafficking is understood (Bjelland, 2016; Di Nicola, 2007; Skilbrei, 2010). What this article adds to these perspectives are the challenges introduced to social workers’ identification work by the shifting institutional frameworks that become relevant at different stages of the process. While initially relating to a social work and welfare perspective, the necessity to consider criminal justice perspectives in relating to assistance needs can create ethical pressures and considerable qualms relating to social workers’ ideal of beneficence to the people they work with (Brunovskis & Surtees, 2019).
The dilemmas in identification work and the background for these different applications of the human trafficking term are illuminated by an understanding of identification as work processes relating to social classifications that are active on different levels: individual, interpersonal and institutional/administrative (Jenkins, 2000), and with shifting institutional frameworks that become relevant. Individually, the women rarely see themselves as victims, nor does the trafficking terminology particularly resonate with them in most cases. Interpersonally, in describing one-to-one exchanges and assessments, social workers see complexity and underline the inherent difficulties in drawing a line between trafficked and non-trafficked. They also to some extent questioned their own right to classify someone as exploited, especially when that person might see their situation as their best shot at a better life. Social workers employed at this stage an understanding that most human trafficking has its basis in personal or structural vulnerability, that victims might indeed have consented to both prostitution and to their working conditions and still classify as victims, and that notions of ideal victimhood were counterproductive.
However, assessments were different when it came to administrative classification: those who conformed to the idealised victim stereotype recognised themselves as victims and/or felt that the human trafficking terminology was relevant and appropriate to describing their situation, were seen as more likely to succeed in the justice system. This also meant that they would more likely benefit from trafficking-specific assistance, which is more extensive. The identification practice of social workers thus appears separate from their (ideological) understanding of human trafficking. At the interpersonal level, social workers have room for thinking about trafficking as taking place along a continuum and for recognising the complexities in women’s experiences of violence and exploitation. At the level of administrative categorisation, this room disappears, because the logic of the justice system has such a dominant role in further outcomes. Since the women and their own presentation of their situation need to fit with the binary logic of the legal justice system, the room for continuum and grey areas evaporates. Where at the individual and interpersonal levels there is space for potentially trafficked women’s ambivalence and changes in perception and self-understanding over time, the administrative category of trafficking victim rests on binaries: vulnerability versus non-vulnerability, cooperation versus non-cooperation, telling the truth versus lying. Social workers thus appear to shift their perspective and try to see the cases from a criminal justice point of view, and further, to try to predict, in each case, the chances of a successful investigation.
Based on a social work tenet of beneficence to their clients, social workers do sometimes consider that ‘helping’ would be more likely to lead to ‘harming’. They also expressed that this had led to them identifying fewer and fewer victims in recent years – not necessarily because they observed less exploitation, but because they feared that identification might be harmful. Social workers do not start out from an understanding that only ‘ideal victims’ should be defined as trafficked or receive assistance. On the contrary, this is an idea that they strongly object to. Ironically, though, ‘ideal victims’ have a higher chance of succeeding in the justice system, and social workers have a stronger belief that such individuals will also benefit from being identified as a trafficking victim, leading them to be more likely to recommend trafficking-specific assistance in such cases.
As discussed above, in some cases possible trafficking victims did receive assistance, though not as victims or within the trafficking-specific assistance system. As such, it would perhaps not appear so important whether someone is identified as a trafficking victim. However, apart from this often being less comprehensive assistance, social workers also worried about the effect of falling registered numbers of identification at an accumulated and policy level. These numbers are given political significance and taken as indicative of developments (Chuang, 2014; Feingold, 2010; Weitzer, 2014). There was therefore a concern that falling numbers would be taken as a sign of the success of Norwegian anti-trafficking work in terms of presenting an image that there was less trafficking, and not be considered reflective of what social workers saw as the underlying issue – an assistance system and legislation that were failing all but a small group of victims.
Notions of ideal victimhood and the privileging of innocence have been criticised and become a cause for concern in human trafficking studies. The propensity to more often identify victims that appear innocent and unknowing is often assumed to be based in ideological and gendered discourses of innocence and deservedness (Rodríguez-López, 2018; Srikantiah, 2007). On closer examination, it appears that a greater chance of ‘ideal victims’ being identified can in some instances also be more complex. In the case of social workers in Norway, it is paradoxically a concern for the welfare of trafficking victims who are not ‘ideal’ that can lead to their non-identification, and not an idea that they are in any way less ‘deserving’ of assistance. Social workers believe that not only are these women less likely to benefit from being identified but that it may, in some cases, even harm them. Thus, the same result – more ideal victims are identified – can rest on different premises and processes. This illustrates the importance of examining day-to-day interventions and interactions if the intention is to understand what shapes policy in practice, not least if the aim is to improve policy responses.
In terms of implications for social work practice, bringing these issues to light can help contextualise qualms that social workers may have about their identification work and challenges they face, underlining the institutional processes at play rather than framing difficulties in trafficking identification primarily as a question of social workers’ competence and skills. The findings in this article to some extent challenge the idea that more knowledge about trafficking will facilitate the identification of possible victims (see, for example, Burt, 2019; Havig and Mahapatra, 2021). All social workers interviewed for this study were very knowledgeable and had several years of experience in the trafficking field, knew the legal and institutional landscape well, and they were more than able to recognise signs that someone might be exploited. However, barriers in their identification work were, in addition to institutional shortcomings, also related to the women’s own perceptions of their situations. This underlines that trafficking identification is not a one-way procedure in which possible victims are passive agents to be found and helped, but rather a negotiated process that is also shaped by institutional constraints for all parties involved. This is not to say that awareness and knowledge about trafficking are not necessary, but far more important is the existence of effective and attractive protection and assistance systems with more foreseeable individual outcomes so that the beneficence of trafficking identification clearly outweighs potentially negative consequences.
Conclusion
Identification of victims is not merely a matter of victims’ self-identification or understanding of their situation, nor of their interactions with social workers and the social workers’ interpretation of the women’s situation. This article has also demonstrated how identification is not just about ticking off a list of criteria that decide whether someone administratively ‘fits’ or not. All three levels are at play at once and impact on each other. Tension and friction between the levels sometimes leads to considerable ambiguity and unease for the social workers, as well as resistance (both active and passive) to the requirements made on them by anti-trafficking policies.
Important questions are therefore who is formally identified as trafficking victims and not least, what do the reported numbers of assisted victims of trafficking in Norway and elsewhere reflect? Reported numbers of trafficking victims represent institutional processes and priorities, rather than the actual level of exploitation in different sectors. The process of identification or assignation of the victim of trafficking label is highly fluid and responds to institutional, bureaucratic and legal developments that directly and indirectly come to define in practice the criteria for assignation of a victim label.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway. [information will be supplied after review].
