Trafficking Women's Human Rights
 
The history of human beings bought and sold, forced into lives of abject servitude or sexual slavery, is a story as old as civilizaton and yet still of global concern today. How this story is told, Julietta Hua argues, says much about our cultural beliefs. Through a critical inquiry into representations of human trafficking, she reveals the political, social, and cultural strains underlying our current preoccupation with this issue and the difficulty of framing human rights in universal terms. 
 
In Trafficking Women's Human Rights, Hua maps the ways in which government, media, and scholarship have described sex trafficking for U.S. consumption. As her investigation takes us from laws like the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act to political speeches and literary and media images, it uncovers dark assumptions about race, difference, and the United States' place in the world expressed--and often promoted--by such images. The framing itself, exploiting dichotomies of victim/agent, rescued/rescuer, and trafficked/smuggled, illustrates the limits of unversalism in addressing human rights. 
 
Author: Julietta Hua
Published By: The University of Minnesota Press, 2011
Format: Paperback, 126 pages