Accessing services: trafficking victims'/survivors' experiences in the UK

Abstract

This thesis explores the processes through which sexual trafficking is currently emerging as an identified, spoken about and acted upon social problem, and finds that a dominant story on sexual trafficking appears to be emerging in the UK. The thesis argues that this dominant story frequently fails to reflect the continuum of experience(s) lived, and thereafter recounted, by those women it concerns. As a result, policies and services are developed which are incapable of reflecting or meeting the needs of trafficked women’s multifarious experience(s). In this respect, the thesis explores the social consequences related to the telling of stories, as well as the social and cultural processes within which stories are and/or may be told (Plummer 1995).

Through focusing upon trafficking victims’/survivors’ ability to seek and/or receive help and assistance in the UK context, the thesis finds that the dominance of one public narrative or story on sexual trafficking is problematic for trafficked women when accessing help and assistance, especially if their stories fail to “fit”. On the other hand, at other times, where women’s stories do “fit”, help and services have been accessed through the telling of the dominant sexual trafficking story. The thesis explores how these discourses interact and change over time where trafficked women encounter UK police officers and immigration officials, and when trafficked women apply for asylum to remain in the UK. Parallels have been drawn throughout the thesis with similar, and related, situations documented by feminist researchers where representations of prostitution, rape and/or intimate partner violence within legal or social frameworks are not reflective of the complexity of those realities (Hamner 1989; Kelly & Radford 1996; Lees 1996a 1996b; Self 2003; Stanko 2007).