Sex, gender and migrations: Facing up to ambiguous realities

The United Kingdom was blessedly free of the 'trafficking' scare when I moved here a few years ago. A classic moral panic involving foreigners, sexual slavery and child abuse already had been in full swing for some years in Western Europe, but when I tried to find it here I had a hard time. Accompanying outreach educators working around London's Seven Sisters in 1998, I asked about non-UK sex workers, and places they were said to be working, and though I managed to squeeze out a few rumours, the subject was obviously not common or pertinent. 'They say there are Polish women working in the back of some Turkish cafes,' I was told. 'I know a French woman who works in Soho.' That kind of thing, anecdotal and unimportant, hardly the stuff of Home Office decrees, repeated BBC documentaries and thunderous headlines. Four years later, the island has joined Europe. Without much hard evidence that more foreign sex workers have actually arrived in the UK, the tone of outrage and panic now matches that of the continent. I saw a similar situation in various countries of Latin America a couple of years ago. A visitor asking about 'trafficking' elicited sensationalist stories that had been heard in the media, always associating it with predatory foreign men. No 'discourse' had formed on the subject, even in a country like Colombia, accused in the European press of being a major 'sending' country for enslaved women. Recently, however, Colombia has passed a national antitrafficking law. All over the world, now, 'trafficking for sexual