Kostoula Maki, Nikos Bozatzis

Accounting for the Phenomenon of Sex-Trafficking: Cultural Representations and Social Accountability in NGO-Employees’ Interview Talk

Introduction

Accounting for the phenomenon of sex-trafficking: cultural representations and social accountability in ngo-employees’ interview talk. Explores NGO employees' discourse on sex-trafficking in Greece, analyzing cultural representations, social accountability, and ideological images. Links to gender, migration, and power dynamics.

Abstract

Τhe fight against sex-trafficking constitutes a pillar of American foreign policy. Closely related to the agenda of the Republican party at first, it soon developed into an international moral panic, with nation-States aligning to its cause. In civil society, also, sex-trafficking became a field of operation for various N.G.O.s. In the critical sociotheoretical literature, however, sex-trafficking is treated as a node around which interweave discourses and institutional practices on gender, migration, class and labour. Within this critical literature, though, there is an empirical lacuna regarding the ideological imagery and representations of cultural identities mobilised in talk on the actors involved in sex-trafficking. The present paper addresses this lacuna. We analyze data from an interview study with 36 NGO employees deploying tools and concepts from critical discursive social psychology. The study took place in 2009-2011, a time when sex-trafficking appeared prominently in Greek public discourse. Analysis highlights ways in which ideological images and positions, pertaining to orientalist and occidentalist cultural frameworks, are mobilised within participants’ discourse while they attend to their social accountability. It is argued that the cultural representation practices that are often constructed in terms of moral panic as well as the victimisaton constructions identified in the conversational extracts constitute a complex rhetorical and ideological context. The shift between orientalist and occidentalist positions as factual interpretative devices and the constructions of “self” and “other” interweave with shifting and rhetorically oriented positions about gender, race, national identity and psychological attributions regarding the victim’s profile.

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