The traffic in women for marriage: an examination of a critical oversight in international trafficking legislation

© 2013 Dr. Kaye Lynne QuekThis thesis examines the extent to which particular forms of marriage meet the criteria for trafficking in persons outlined in international law, and thus, whether they can be seen as constituting situations of human trafficking, in and of themselves. In addition, the thesis investigates why marriage has not been included in dominant conceptions of the traffic in women, both in academic writing and in international and state-based policy and legislative approaches. While an extensive body of scholarly literature examines the problem of trafficking in persons from a variety of perspectives, there is little discussion in these works of how marriage may operate as a type of trafficking in women. Analyses that seek to understand the harms that occur when marriage is the outcome of trafficking are also largely absent in the literature. This thesis seeks to address this oversight in research through case study analysis of three prominent and controversial marriage practices in the West: mail-order bride (MOB) marriage in the United States (US), forced marriage in Britain, and Fundamentalist Mormon polygamy in the US and Canada. Each case is examined in terms of the three constitutive elements of trafficking in persons outlined in international law: the act, the means, and the purpose. The thesis argues that these forms of marriage meet the international legal criteria for trafficking in persons – thereby highlighting a wider problem of ‘marriage trafficking’ – and should be recognised as types of contemporary trafficking in women, in their own right. The thesis focuses, in particular, on the approach to trafficking in persons taken at the international level by the United Nations (UN) and its subsidiaries, and by states in the West, especially the US and Britain. Within the case studies, a number of ‘cultural artifacts’ are the focus of analysis, including: MOB websites, government and non-governmental organisation (NGO) reports, as well as court documents and witness testimonies. The thesis draws on radical feminist political theory for its conceptual framework, as radical feminism provides an especially robust understanding of the nature of female exploitation in marriage. It concludes that the harms of ‘marriage trafficking’ include sexual, domestic, and reproductive exploitation of women by men. It also suggests that ‘marriage trafficking’ is potentially more severe than other types of trafficking in persons, due to the combination of abuses it involves