In October of 2003, out of the blue, President Putin changed his mind. In an im­portant policy speech, he announced a new commitment to the issue of human trafficking and then introduced his version of the trafficking legislation into the Duma. After some last-minute wrangling, the legislation was revised and resub­mitted to the Duma and […]

As the NGOs were deepening their focus on trafficking, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was quietly participating in various high-level diplomatic meet­ings on trafficking, such as through the OSCE. This international attention led this ministry to be “the first government structure to know about this problem” and Russia to sign the U. N. Trafficking […]

In 1997, one month before the Global Survival Network conference brought global feminist approaches to trafficking to Russian activists, the Russian Duma held its first roundtable on the subject. Co-sponsored by American Universi­ty’s TraCCC (Highlights from the Duma Roundtable on Trafficking 1999), the roundtable followed an April seminar on organized crime and the exploitation of […]

Simultaneous with the emergence of this activism, foreign actors were also put­ting pressure directly on administrators and policymakers to reform policy. Per­haps, together, domestic activism and foreign intervention could prove powerful impetus for policy reform. Or would the foreign intervention backfire, provoking national resistance and undermining the women’s crisis centers?

The divide between these two sets of organizations led to separate public aware­ness campaigns made possible by significant foreign funding. The crisis centers unaffiliated with the Angel Coalition increased their focus on spreading discus­sion of the problem through the Russian women’s movement. In 2002, drawing legitimacy from the U. N. Trafficking Protocol, leading Moscow activists […]

This special journal issue illustrates the movement’s quest to both appropriate and translate the global feminist understandings of trafficking (Abubikirova et al. 1999). The editors employed GAATW’s (sex-work feminist) definition, but, high­lighting their understanding of trafficking as linked to new (1993) freedoms for Russians to travel abroad for work, the preface to the journal names […]

More so than for other issues, outsiders, not Russian activists, broached the prob­lem of trafficking in women in Russia. Although as early as 1993 at least one cri­sis center began collecting information from their callers about their experience with trafficking (Khodyreva 1996), most did not include trafficking as one of their target issues. This was […]

While many Western governments had concerned themselves with the issue of trafficking, including initiatives in Eastern Europe and Eurasia by the European Union and Nordic Council of Ministers, the United States took the boldest stand with the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act and its reauthorizations in 2003 and 2005. As with the U. N. protocol, […]

As global feminists rekindled the U. N.’s attention to trafficking through the yearly Commission on the Status of Women (Ucarer 1999), the conflict between antiprostitution and sex-work feminists shaped the debate. In 2000, after more than a year of contentious discussion, the U. N. passed a protocol on “Traffick­ing in Persons, Especially Women and Children.” […]

Western, especially American, feminists have a long history of being concerned about the issue of trafficking in white women (and children), particularly traf­ficking leading to sexual exploitation. The first wave of activism against “white slavery”—trafficking of women across borders for the purpose of prostitution— began around the turn of the twentieth century and resulted in […]