From the International to the Local in Feminist Legal Responses to Rape, Prostitution/Sex Work and Sex Trafficking: Four Studies in Contemporary Governance Feminism

Abstract:     
This Article is the result of an intense series of text and telephone exchanges among the four of us, taking place from December 2005 to April 2006. Each of us has her own project which forms the basis of her contribution to this conversation. Janet Halley is working on new rules governing wartime sexual violence in international humanitarian law, specifically the place of rape and sexual slavery in the decisions of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Chantal Thomas has published widely on the law of trade;1 one of her papers examines the feminist debate over the 2001 U.N. Trafficking Protocol.2 Hila Shamir and Prabha Kotiswaran have studied emergent national regimes addressing the connection between local prostitution markets and international “sex trafficking” in Holland, Sweden, and Israel (Shamir) and in India (Kotiswaran). Shamir compares legal regimes for governing sex trafficking and the related prostitution industry within national borders; Kotiswaran studies the highly local negotiations between stakeholders in the sex industry in India through ªeld work in Tirupati and Kolkata. Shamir and Koti-swaran take special note of the striking but very different impact of the 2001 Protocol and the United States’ Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (the VTVPA)3 in Israel and India.

Keywords: Governance Feminism, Dominance Feminism, Prostitution, Sex Work, Trafficking, Rape, Abolitionism

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