Politicization of Trafficked Persons Deconstructed

Abstract

This thesis reconsiders notions on victimhood in the context of human trafficking in migrant domestic workers in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Topics such as victimization, (dis)empowerment and power are discussed. This thesis argues that a prototypical victim narrative of an innocent and blameless victim belongs to a mythmaking anti-trafficking discourse. This implies that the prototypical victim does not tally with personal human trafficking experiences but is actually in use at the forefront of the current governmental and non-governmental anti-trafficking discourse. Whereas the government sets a high threshold for the label ‘victim’ in order to assert that there is not widespread human trafficking in Jordan, non-governmental sectors set a lower threshold to the label ‘victim’ in order to imply the magnitude of the practice. This thesis critically explores how victim portrayals are products of a conjunction of hidden governmental and non-governmental political agendas. It is named here ‘politics of portrayal’ or ‘threshold politics’, whereby the hidden politics are related to international representativeness, (Western) moral ideologies, conservative agendas or financial rhetorics. This thesis aims to counter the focus on victimization through contrasting stereotypical victim images with ‘hidden voices’ of presumed trafficked persons. As an alternative to the prototypical victim, a victim continuum model is put forward. The bottom line is that rather than a uniform victimhood, there are different gradations of victimhood. In the current context, victimhood is intrinsically linked to (dis)empowerment, and this thesis suggests that no individual is completely empowered nor disempowered. A main argument is that presumed trafficked persons continually may reflect on which coping strategies provide them the best way to influence existing power relations and hence to manage exploitative conditions. This thesis concludes by discussing the relevance of scrutinizing the victim narrative outside its current context and by providing examples for further research based on analytical viewpoints created in this thesis.