Sex Trafficking and Modern Slavery ─ The Absence of Evidence

Human trafficking, forced labour, unlawful migration and slavery remain politically loaded, empirically obtuse and ambiguous terms that fail to impact on creating better livelihoods. This book builds on the authors’ previous book Sex Trafficking to re-examine international counter-trafficking scholarship and policy and re-engage with the original data to produce a renewed call for specific forms of research and inquiry to better understand and respond to the range of exploitative practices and conditions that give rise to human trafficking.

This book makes a significant contribution to critical feminist scholarship as well as the burgeoning field of crimmigration. It argues that exploitation sits at the nexus of global migration patterns and emphasizes the importance of speaking to those directly affected by counter trafficking policies and those directly involved in their implementation in order to produce empirical data to inform how we make sense of the numbers that are produced, the outcome of the policies and how we ought to determine success in this context.

Marie Segrave is an Associate Professor in Criminology at Monash University and leads the Traffi cking and Labour Exploitation research agenda of the Border Crossing Observatory.She is also an ARC DECRA Fellow researching unlawful migrant labour, exploitation and regulation (2014–2018).

Sanja Milivojevic is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at La Trobe University. Her primary research interest is migration and borders. Sanja’s latest book Sexting and Young People is published by Palgrave (with Crofts, Lee and McGovern).

Sharon Pickering is Professor of Criminology and Head of the School of Social Sciences at Monash University. She is co-director of the Border Crossing Observatory and author of?14 books.